LAS VEGAS, NEVADA—Consumer SSD development has largely centered on 2.5-inch or tiny mSATA form factors. By using the larger 3.5-inch form factor, however, Other World Computing plans to push SSD capacities up to 2TB for Mac Pro or other workstation users.

Dubbed the "Mercury Viper," the bright blue, aluminum-clad SSDs are designed to fit the larger 3.5-inch drive bays found in most tower-style PCs. The extra volume allows OWC to pack more high-capacity NAND chips on a single "board," starting at 240GB and going all the way up to 2TB. OWC also promises 600MB/s transfer rates from the SandForce-powered drives over an SATA 3 connection.

OWC still makes a variety of 2.5-inch SSDs which can be used in a full-size workstation with an adapter bracket. But such drives typically max out in capacity at around 512GB. With a maximum of 2TB, it will be possible to outfit a four-bay workstation with up to 8TB of fast SSD storage. Those drives could be configured in a software RAID for even faster throughput.

Still, the capacity and performance won't come cheap. Pricing hasn't been finalized, but users can expect to pay a premium. "We designed the Viper primarily for performance and capacity, not price," OWC spokesperson Grant Dahlke told Ars.

That's in stark contrast to where the rest of the market is headed, typically driving costs down and making the most of 2.5-inch and mSATA form factors used in notebooks and Ultrabooks. But workstation owners may care less about budget and more about getting work done. "We think the price will be right for the kind of user that spends $6,000 on a computer," Dahlke said. "And you can't get this kind of capacity anywhere else."

Development of the Mercury Viper is still being finalized, but Dahlke said he expects the company to announce pricing and availability by March 1.

Seems hard to believe how well it will do vs the 2.5" 960GB SSD Crucial is releasing for <$600. You can use those 2-in-1 2.5" brackets to fit a LOT of 2.5" in most workstations. Hopefully it runs around $1200-1400 or even less.

$2000 for 2TB would sting hard. I think I'd rather stick with outdated spinning disks at that price.

[get off of my lawn]

I remember when a 2 GB disk used to cost that much, and required a full-height 5-1/4" enclosure to contain it. Thansfer rate: <10MB/sec.

[get back on my lawn]

Hah. I'm not old enough to have been concerned about the costs back then, but I do remember when we upgraded our hard drive to a ~50 MB one and didn't know what to do with all that extra space. While magnetic drives are pretty poor speed-wise, they sure are quite impressive when you consider what they do and the space they do it in.

At the presumed high price point, does a SSD still have a speed advantage over a RAID array of similar cost? You can get a lot of 1-2TB disks for $2k, so with the right controller would it be possible to have equivalent throughput with higher capacity for the same price?

At the presumed high price point, does a SSD still have a speed advantage over a RAID array of similar cost? You can get a lot of 1-2TB disks for $2k, so with the right controller would it be possible to have equivalent throughput with higher capacity for the same price?

Space in your case might be an issue though, other than that I would assume it would be way better to spend $2k on smaller SSDs and RAID-ing them together (though that comes with it's own disadvantages like no TRIM IIRC, the sheer number would hopefully make up for that).

At the presumed high price point, does a SSD still have a speed advantage over a RAID array of similar cost? You can get a lot of 1-2TB disks for $2k, so with the right controller would it be possible to have equivalent throughput with higher capacity for the same price?

There is also the possibility of using better spinny drives. You don't have to use the cheapest thing available at Newegg. You could use something that is actually intended for professional use.

Even among SSDs, there's a wide variance in performance and reliability. For anything other than random IO, the improvement gains of SSD may not be all that.

OWC is horribly expensive, for example the OWC MBA kits are around $1.50/GB while mSSD's are around $1/GB. I wish they had some good competition in the mac SSD space. They're priced just enough much cheaper than Apple BTO to get buyers.

At the presumed high price point, does a SSD still have a speed advantage over a RAID array of similar cost? You can get a lot of 1-2TB disks for $2k, so with the right controller would it be possible to have equivalent throughput with higher capacity for the same price?

There is also the possibility of using better spinny drives. You don't have to use the cheapest thing available at Newegg. You could use something that is actually intended for professional use.

Even among SSDs, there's a wide variance in performance and reliability. For anything other than random IO, the improvement gains of SSD may not be all that.

The WD Red drives are 1TB=$100, 3TB=$200. Seagate constellations are about the same...

I'm sure that the external case and power draw would be downsides, but I'd feel more comfortable having my data on a dozen mechanical drives than one massive SSD...

SSD development has largely centered on 2.5" or tiny mSATA form factors.

Consumer SSD development has largely centered around 2.5". Enterprise flash drives that go into SAN arrays (EMC, NetApp and so on) are largely 3.5". They tend to cost tens of thousands per terabyte though.

I'm sure that the external case and power draw would be downsides, but I'd feel more comfortable having my data on a dozen mechanical drives than one massive SSD...

I'm sure that OWC realizes this as well, and this is the very definition of a niche product.

But it's good that someone is making it if only as a test bed for future development. They'll probably only sell a couple thousand (hundred?) in the life of the product, but we'll all benefit from the learning experience as paid for by others.

(Besides, it will give financially-foolish high-end system builders something to fill all their 3.5" bays for ultimate bragging rights.)

Seems hard to believe how well it will do vs the 2.5" 960GB SSD Crucial is releasing for <$600. You can use those 2-in-1 2.5" brackets to fit a LOT of 2.5" in most workstations. Hopefully it runs around $1200-1400 or even less.

Yeah, I'd like to see the comparable performance numbers. I know that OWC offers a 960GB SSD now, but it's basically 2x 480GB boards stuffed in an enclosure and RAIDed somehow. And I know performance isn't that great.

The 3.5" drives should be able to handle more capacity, but also more performance. And the extra volume will dissipate heat better... I wonder if that will have an affect on reliability?

At the presumed high price point, does a SSD still have a speed advantage over a RAID array of similar cost? You can get a lot of 1-2TB disks for $2k, so with the right controller would it be possible to have equivalent throughput with higher capacity for the same price?

Space in your case might be an issue though, other than that I would assume it would be way better to spend $2k on smaller SSDs and RAID-ing them together (though that comes with it's own disadvantages like no TRIM IIRC, the sheer number would hopefully make up for that).

About TRIM support on SSD RAID, I was doing some research on it a few months back. On the Windows side, Intel is pushing out drivers so it does support TRIM if you have the right hardware. On the Mac, there's a third party driver from SoftRaid that supports it as well.

I have 2 Samsung 830's striped on my 2011 MacBook Pro. I really wanted to use SoftRaid for the TRIM support but it doesn't support BootCamp partitions.

SSD development has largely centered on 2.5" or tiny mSATA form factors.

Consumer SSD development has largely centered around 2.5". Enterprise flash drives that go into SAN arrays (EMC, NetApp and so on) are largely 3.5". They tend to cost tens of thousands per terabyte though.

I am suprised that there was no competition in this part of the market before. There were always customers who were willing to pay a premium for devices. Especially ones which have clear advantages like high capacity SSD's.

Stripe two together and shrink the partition to 2 TB and you'll still match the approximate performance for a lot lower cost. Or use the full 6 TB if you don't mind the performance hit as it fills up.

(Caveat applies to using RAID-0 for anything without timely backups.)

You could match sequential performance with raided magnetic drives easily; you'll never come close to matching random IO performance with a normal sized array, or latency at all. Random IO is only a few MB/sec even on the fastest drives while the best consumer SSDs can get ~100 MB/sec read (300MB/sec write) in random mode. Raiding won't do anything at all to help with multi millisecond seek times dominating latency.

heh... I remember when we got our 120MB (not a typo) full height drive for our AT class machine running TBBS...

But enough reminiscing... :-)

It seems to me that it wont be long until you can front load your media of choice with a TB (or more) of RAM and a good write through algorithm... and then just read the whole media (or the most used portion) into RAM, back like we used to do on the IBM mainframe when disks used to be as big as a refrigerator...

The technology keeps changing... but how you wring out that last ounce of performance is a lot more of the same old same old...

Stripe two together and shrink the partition to 2 TB and you'll still match the approximate performance for a lot lower cost. Or use the full 6 TB if you don't mind the performance hit as it fills up.

(Caveat applies to using RAID-0 for anything without timely backups.)

You could match sequential performance with raided magnetic drives easily; you'll never come close to matching random IO performance with a normal sized array, or latency at all. Random IO is only a few MB/sec even on the fastest drives while the best consumer SSDs can get ~100 MB/sec read (300MB/sec write) in random mode. Raiding won't do anything at all to help with multi millisecond seek times dominating latency.

Thing is, if you need to match IO performance you can just as easily get PCIe-based SSD solutions, which will probably wipe the floor with this (though price won't exactly be the same). Correct me if I'm wrong but this still seems to be aimed at the consumer segment, and I don't know how many consumers need high sequential performance and insane IO performance on the same drive/cluster of drives, though as tigas mentioned, there will probably be pros who'll appreciate the performance and price point.

I was under the impression that RAID didn't actually benefit SSDs performance-wise? Isn't that true?

You might still do it for redundancy or to create a large logical volume of course, but are you sure that RAIDing SSDs is a performance boon?

It depends on how many drives it takes to saturate your controller. Most setups have anywhere from 2 to 8 drives hooked up to a single SATA3 controller, and not all controllers can actually handle 6GB/s. But if you do it right... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eULFf6F5Ri8

I was under the impression that RAID didn't actually benefit SSDs performance-wise? Isn't that true?

You might still do it for redundancy or to create a large logical volume of course, but are you sure that RAIDing SSDs is a performance boon?

It depends on how many drives it takes to saturate your controller. Most setups have anywhere from 2 to 8 drives hooked up to a single SATA3 controller, and not all controllers can actually handle 6GB/s. But if you do it right... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eULFf6F5Ri8

Could be awesome for video editing. Depending on the volume they do, they might be able to keep the cost around $1/GB and still make a nice profit.

Not to mention 3-D modeling...

In any case, OWC deserves credit here--putting projects like this into production will advance technology and lower costs for everyone, as the offerings expand.

As a side benefit--SSDs are much better than spinning disks on energy consumption, and are noiseless. When coupled with well-designed enclosures, noise levels should drop significantly as well for large installations...

Thing is, if you need to match IO performance you can just as easily get PCIe-based SSD solutions, which will probably wipe the floor with this (though price won't exactly be the same). Correct me if I'm wrong but this still seems to be aimed at the consumer segment, and I don't know how many consumers need high sequential performance and insane IO performance on the same drive/cluster of drives, though as tigas mentioned, there will probably be pros who'll appreciate the performance and price point.

Why do you assume it's aimed at the consumer segment? Consumers don't really need 2TB of extremely fast storage. They need maybe 512GB max, and room for their movies and porn which might as well be on a spinning disk for all the good speed does that kind of storage.

If the pricetag was in any way comparable to a spinning disk, sure gimme, gimme. For $1500, I can't think of many consumers that could justify this when they'll see almost 0 benefit.

Professionals have a range of uses that could benefit from very fast storage, even somewhat volatile storage. (That Sandforce controller... ). Video for one, which I mentioned before - working with projects in After Effects gets tedious when you are reading from slow storage. Storage also runs out fast when you have 1MB PNG's as sources for your frames...

Thing is, if you need to match IO performance you can just as easily get PCIe-based SSD solutions, which will probably wipe the floor with this (though price won't exactly be the same). Correct me if I'm wrong but this still seems to be aimed at the consumer segment, and I don't know how many consumers need high sequential performance and insane IO performance on the same drive/cluster of drives, though as tigas mentioned, there will probably be pros who'll appreciate the performance and price point.

Why do you assume it's aimed at the consumer segment? Consumers don't really need 2TB of extremely fast storage. They need maybe 512GB max, and room for their movies and porn which might as well be on a spinning disk for all the good speed does that kind of storage.

If the pricetag was in any way comparable to a spinning disk, sure gimme, gimme. For $1500, I can't think of many consumers that could justify this when they'll see almost 0 benefit.

Professionals have a range of uses that could benefit from very fast storage, even somewhat volatile storage. (That Sandforce controller... ). Video for one, which I mentioned before - working with projects in After Effects gets tedious when you are reading from slow storage. Storage also runs out fast when you have 1MB PNG's as sources for your frames...

L.

My bad. From the tone of the article, the fact that OWC's target isn't exactly the pro market and the "up to 2Tb" hinting there would be lower capacity drives, I falsely assumed it was aimed at a part of the consumer segment. For all the rest, I completely agree with you.